Internationally acclaimed humanistic Iranian
director Jafar Panahi ("The Circle"/"Crimson
Gold"/"The White Balloon") helms this engaging,
insightful, and crowd-pleasing comedy sports drama
that was winner of the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film
Festival. It's a good-natured tale that pokes fun at
how the current Iranian regime keeps women down as
third-class citizens. Using nonprofessional actors and
cowriting with Shadmehr Rastin, the often banned
director in his country (all his films are almost
impossible to see in Iran except through bootleg DVDs)
fashions from a simple soccer story a cleverly
low-keyed political allegory tale about the absurdity
of banning females from attending sports events.

Tehran is excited about the big game in the 100,000
Azadi Stadium, as Iran's national team is playing
against Bahrain to determine who will qualify to
appear in the 2006 World Cup. According to Islamic
custom only men can attend these games (it's explained
by a soldier, because men curse during games and women
shouldn't have to hear such profanity). One
inexperienced girl soccer fan rides to the game in a
bus filled with fanatical chanting young men fans and
after paying an inflated price to a scalper for a
ticket, is stopped at the gate when squeamish about
being searched by a male security guard and is held
with five other teenage girls dressed as boys--some
with faces painted in Iran's national colors. The six
girls are confined to a makeshift holding pen just
outside the stadium walls, where they are guarded by
mostly rural soldiers who are about their same age.
The soldiers are not happy about the assignment and
seem to be trapped just like the girls into obeying an
absurd law. For the moment the duty bound
soldiers and the rebellious women prisoners are
adversaries, but the men soon look upon them as their
sisters and wish to protect their virtue (there's an
hilarious scene of a soldier escorting one of the
females to the toilet and having difficulty keeping
the men out, as the problem is that there are no
toilet facilities for women in the stadium). The
viewer, like the confined girls, never sees the soccer
game, which becomes an important plot device decision
to tell us how closed the country can be to outsiders.
What it does show is how the soldiers argue,
chit-chat, share dreams and a sense of national pride
with their spirited lady soccer fan prisoners. Though
everything seems giddy in this cinema verité
presentation, things suddenly change when they are
sent by bus to the Vice Squad and several girls now
realize the danger of their lighthearted rebellion
might come with a big price and begin to cry. But the
film ends on an upbeat note, as the girls humanize the
soldiers and the overjoyed street mob embraces both
the girls and soldiers into their spontaneous victory
celebration. This metaphorical mob scene is Panahi's
optimistic vision for the country to come to its
senses through a universal liberation from their
oppressions, as it shows how sports can unite people
and nationalism can be used to gain freedom for all
people in Iran.

The title comes from a soccer term, which means to
have broken the rules by crossing the last line of
defenders without having the ball. Panahi's heroines
have similarly crossed the line of Iranian social
order, but their infraction still scores for their
side points with the people.